Religion and Social Movements

Isaac Touro delivered a Hebrew Thanksgiving sermon on Nov. 28, 1765, praising King George III for protecting Newport’s Jews. His sermon took place before worshippers in the new Touro Synagogue. Since 1658, Newport had been a haven for Jews who escaped ...

Putting together the first woman suffrage cook book in 1886 must have been a lot like herding cats for Hattie A. Burr of 12 Wayne St., Boston. The cookbook was printed to raise money for the Woman Suffrage Association, and ...

In April of 1944, Stanislaus Orlemanski, a priest from Springfield, Mass., was called on to travel to Russia to square off with Joseph Stalin over the fate of Poland. In a frosty airfield in Great Falls, Montana, the 54-yer-old priest ...

The oldest public high schools in the United States are in New England, a result of the Puritan belief that all children should be educated so they could read the Bible. There are only four 17th-century public high schools in ...

Born in 1777 in Coventry, Connecticut, Lorenzo Dow decided he was a Methodist preacher, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer. The church tried multiple times to distance itself from him, but he pursued his course and would become ...

In 1846, 16-year-old Emily Dickinson made a rare foray outside of her Amherst, Mass., home to visit the biggest tourist attraction on the East Coast: Mount Auburn Cemetery. Two years later, an estimated 60,000 people would visit the famous pleasure ...

People still can’t seem to get enough of the Salem witch trials, which remain a mainstay of popular culture 325 years after they started. Writers and artists used the Salem witch trials to show why government persecutes the innocent, how the ignorant ...

The Beecher family of Litchfield, Ct. – the children of Rev. Lyman Beecher and his two wives Roxanne and Harriet – each made their mark on history to lesser of greater degrees. The author Harriet Beecher Stowe was the best ...

On Boston's Rat Day of 1917, the upper-class women of Boston gave $1.34 for every rat carcass turned in. The numbers of dead rodents, however, fell far below their expectations. It was the last Rat Day in Beantown. Reports ...

In 1860, U.S. Census takers recorded 328 Greek immigrants living in America. Among them were 40 young men and boys who arrived after the Greek War of Independence, which had left them orphaned. They were given college educations in the ...